


Einsamer Geist

by synergenic (Losseflame)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M, marco follows them around and saves the day, whoops it's the ghost au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-18
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 01:22:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losseflame/pseuds/synergenic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco wakes up dead, and it isn’t really what he expected at all.  He’s not sure how he <i>knows</i> he’s dead, but he opens his eyes and sees the building across from him and the gore strewn merrily across the cobblestones and he knows he’s dead the same way he knows that the sun rises in the east and that Jean will never, <i>never</i> get over this.</p>
<p>"Fuck," he says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Marco wakes up dead, and it isn’t really what he expected at all. He’s not sure how he _knows_ he’s dead, but he opens his eyes and sees the building across from him and the gore strewn merrily across the cobblestones and he knows he’s dead the same way he knows that the sun rises in the east and that Jean will never, _never_ get over this.

“Fuck,” Marco says, because Jean’s self-preservation instincts aren’t exactly the sharpest, despite how he harps on about Eren’s death wish, and Marco had _plans_. For keeping Jean alive, he means.

(Jean was never actually going to the Military Police, Marco thinks. He’d seen it in the light in Jean’s eyes when he was forced to lead, that half-false, completely unwilling courage that _would not let_ him do anything less than something heroic.)

He tries to move and can’t; there’s this sticky, heavy weight pushing him down on all sides and keeping him on his ass, legs splayed.

“You need to get out of your corpse,” Franz says, and Marco whips his head to the side to see Franz holding a hand out to him. Grief filters dully through Marco when he realizes what this means; he’d liked Franz, they’d been friends.

It would have been nice if he lived.

“What?” Marco yells. Sound is coming to him slow and warped, the pressure along his sides acting like cotton in his ears. Franz does some complicated hand movements. Marco looks down, and he’s sure that if he was alive he’d be puking.

Because his corpse – his corpse is _horrific_ , he thinks dizzily, meaty and messy and spilling out at the edges. He can see his arm that’s missing, but he can also see _that it’s missing_ , can count his ribs and organs and he’s starting to get a pretty good idea of what the itch along the right side of his face is. Marco takes a calming breath he shouldn’t be able to feel but does, and the last shreds of his liver fall out as the pressure around him tightens.

Marco extrapolates that it’s rigor mortis.

“Fuck,” Marco repeats, and because Franz could always be a bit of an asshole to everyone but Hannah, he laughs, kicking at Marco’s corpse’s leg. His foot sinks in, and Marco can feel it tingle up his – body? Spirit-body? What _is_ he?

“You get used to it,” Franz assures him, and then stretches his hand out again. “C’mon, though, get out of there.”

Marco tries, yanking at his arm only to have nothing happen at all – the double image of his missing right side and his right side that he can’t make move is weird, unsettling, kind of puts an entirely irrational (what with his being dead and all) fear in his gut – and after his fourth attempt, he looks to Franz exasperatedly. “How?”

Now Franz’s expression flickers, his shoulders rolling in a shrug as he sinks down to sit next to Marco. Coincidentally, he sits through some other poor dead fuck, the occupant of the corpse apparently long gone because Marco doesn’t hear any protest. “You have to like, really focus on it,” Franz says, waving his hands to explain. It makes Marco smile – he’d always liked how Franz’s hands would dance thoughtlessly when he spoke. “More than balancing in your gear, even. I could only do it when –”

He cuts himself off, expression tightening.

“Only when?” Marco prompts, softening his voice. He knows the look of someone who needs an open ear.

“I could only do it when Hannah tried to resuscitate me,” Franz says, laughs bitterly. “I was ripped in half. I just wanted – I wanted to hug her or something, I don’t know.” He shrugs angrily, kicks his heel back on the ground. “I hate it when she cries.”

This is said very softly.

“Oh, _Franz_ ,” Marco sighs. “I’m sorry.”

Franz, after a moment, shakes himself and laughs, something like desperation tingeing the edge of it. “Whatever, man. At least this way – well – fuck, it’s not like anything worse can happen to me, right?”

He smiles. It looks very pained.

“Yeah,” Marco agrees gently. “You’re right.”

And Franz looks so _sad_ , scraping his sleeve across his nose in a defensive gesture, like he’s trying to keep his expression hidden, and Marco –

Well, this time, when Marco tries to move his arm, he can, a wet, sticky sensation sliding across his skin as he slips his corpse arm off, wraps his – ghost arm? – around Franz’s shoulder and drags the boy to his side. Franz sinks halfway into Marco’s corpse, and their bodies prickle as they blend, like a hug only somehow miles more intimate.

“Gross,” Franz says quietly, keeping his grateful eyes on the ground.

…

“Marco?” Jean’s voice says, and Marco cringes. He’d been following Jean for a few hours now – it took Marco a while to find him without Franz’s help; Franz had caught a glimpse of Hannah and shot Marco a grin before speeding off to whisper words of quitting the military into her ear – and Jean has just stumbled onto his corpse. Marco has started to rot, necrotic fluids seeping out to form a puddle around him, and stupidly, Marco wishes this isn’t the last memory Jean has of him.

His corpse is fucking ugly.

“I’m really sorry, Jean,” Marco says, even though it’s pointless, even though he knows now that his voice is just a whisper of cold air to the living. “I –”

And then he stops, because while Franz had explained in great detail what being ripped in half by a Titan feels like, Marco can’t actually remember how he died. He frowns, presses at his memory, and a protesting itch starts in his skull, a roar building in his ears as he – as he –

He doesn’t _want_ to remember.

Marco scrambles out of that place in his head quickly, feeling along the dark, miasmic spot in his mind where the memory of his death should be. It’s sort of twisted, jumbled up in flashes of rejection and pain and this aching hollow in Marco’s chest that makes him press a hand over his heart, rubbing small circles. He takes a deep breath and resolves to deal with it later, focuses back on Jean to see him taking the hilts of Marco’s blades and _oh_ –

It’s like a punch to the gut, seeing that.

“Don’t torture yourself with those, Jean,” Marco pleads, seeing how Jean’s expression ripples as he runs his fingers over Marco’s hilts. “Just let them go.”

He wants to say _Just let_ me _go_ , but the words warp halfway over his tongue, spilling out different and Marco thinks crossly to himself that now is really not the time to be selfish.

Death gives him an interesting perspective on things, and he looks at the hilts Jean holds, thinks to himself _Those are going to cause trouble_.

…

The funeral isn’t what Marco expected it to be, but he’s learning that not a lot is, when you get right down to it. He stands next to Franz who stands next to Hannah who’s crying her heart out, and Marco understands better the way Franz’s voice fell when he talked about Hannah crying.

She cries _honest_ , doesn’t hold back like the rest of the stone-faced members of the 104th, sobs scraping her throat raw as she repeats Franz’s name. Her shoulders shake, snot and tears marring her features, and the look on Franz’s face when he watches her makes Marco think that maybe Franz feels like he’s dying all over again. He doesn’t try to touch her – it puts shivers down the living’s spine, when they do, and it made Marco re-evaluate every damn shiver he’d ever had in his life the first time he saw it – but he does angle his head in close to her ear, tells her how much he loves her and what he wanted their life together to be like.

It feels very private, listening in, but the first thing Marco realized was that the culture of the dead didn’t really have boundaries like the living. So he stays, and listens, and thinks that it would have been nice, if Hannah and Franz got to buy that house Franz is describing. Got to have the kids, the dog, the dwindling away together in their twilight years.

Franz’s voice gets fainter and fainter, and he pulls back to frown at his hands, quickly losing opacity. “Marco…?” he asks, not sounding particularly alarmed at all. “Marco, shit, I think I’m moving on.”

Franz’s skull in the pyre explodes, a piece of his cooked brain falling into a pile of dusty dirt.

Franz grins, his eyes focused on something Marco can’t see, something in front of him that must be beautiful for the way he’s looking at it, and Franz turns to Hannah again quickly. “Love you so much, quit the military, baby, love you –”

He’s gone. Like a candle’s flame being put out by its own wax.

Hannah breathes out a deep, shuddering breath, and there’s a hint of calm in her cries that wasn’t there before, turning her sobs from an expression of pain into something cathartic. Marco smiles.

It wasn’t the ending either of them deserved, but for what they had to work with, Marco doesn’t think it’s so bad.

Huffing out a sigh, he wonders when he’ll start to fade – the other ghosts around him are going quickly, now, as the fire roars louder, and Marco thinks that the last thing he wants to see before he disappears is Jean, rises on his tiptoes and swivels to find him.

Jean is staring with his fists clenched at the pyre, and while Marco can easily pick out which charred, humanoid shape is his, from the way Jean’s eyes are roving from burning corpse to burning corpse it seems that he can’t. Jean swallows thickly, blinks back tears Marco knew he wouldn’t want to shed, because Jean has the machismo delusion ground deep into his thick skull, and Marco sighs.

“Fine, don’t cry for me,” he teases, using the tone that would always make Jean colour pink, like when he’d _casually_ mention how his rivalry with Eren seemed to cover something _much more interesting_ , “But if I could, I’d haunt your ass for it.”

Talking to him doesn’t make Marco feel any better, not like how talking to Hannah helped Franz, but Marco finds himself doing it anyway. Instinct, maybe, left over from when he had a heartbeat. Shuffling closer, enough to start absorbing Jean’s body heat – it feels _good,_ taking in the living’s warmth, almost like having warm blood again – Marco sighs harshly. “I still think keeping the hilts is unhealthy.”

Jean doesn’t respond. Not like Marco expected him to.

Soon, Thomas flickers out a few feet in front of him. Mina goes next, and then it’s only Marco and the living and the pyre that’s burning itself out.

He isn’t fading, Marco thinks nervously, everyone else faded into wherever you’re supposed to go and he hasn’t, he’s still standing next to Jean with his eyes on the pyre and _waiting_ – 

He waits another hour before he figures it just isn’t going to happen.


	2. Chapter 2

Jean’s trying to be quiet and it’s working, mostly, but Marco’s close enough that how quiet he is doesn’t matter, Marco can _hear_. Can see.

And he should look away, Marco knows that – this is all kinds of fucked up, more fucked up than the hilts Jean’s kept and the bone shard he wraps his fingers around when he wakes from a nightmare – but –

Death is so _empty_ , and this makes something that could almost be warm fullness churn in his belly.

With a gaps he chokes off, Jean arcs his neck, one hand flying to cover his mouth as his other works his cock over, fingers occasionally straying _lower_. Marco, because his gasp can’t be heard, doesn’t bother choking his off, breathing ragged through an opened mouth as he dares to step just a bit closer. It’s not like Marco has never seen Jean’s dick – horny teenagers in small spaces for three years tends to make it easy for you to ignore the sound of someone masturbating – but this is _different_.

This, Marco reminds himself, is fucked up, and then he sinks to his knees beside the bed, puts his forearms on the edge and watches how Jean’s facial expressions ripple.

He’s close, now, whining into his palm with eyes squeezed shut and Marco wants to touch him so badly, has wanted to touch him so badly for so long. But Marco just watches, drinks in Jean’s heat as his hips start to stutter, his hand quickening.

“Mar –” Jean bites out as he comes, swallowing back the second syllable in a heave of air.

Marco freezes, feels like he’s been doused in cold water – which doesn’t make _sense_ , he’s the patch of cold air now – and Jean’s expression screws up, a shaking hand combing through his hair in a defensive move one, twice, before it slams onto the mattress. And then he turns onto his side, facing Marco, and Marco can see how Jean fights against the few tears he sheds.

_Oh no_ , Marco thinks despairingly, _I’ve fucked him up so_ badly.

Angrily, Jean cleans himself up, tucks his shaky legs back into pants with trembling hands, and he hunches in on himself for a moment, head cupped in his palms. He breathes deep and slow. Then, in an entirely subconscious move, he slides his hand under the pillow.

_Don’t_ , Marco wants to say. _Don’t do this_.

Jean pulls out the bone shard that kept Marco here, stares at it with a frighteningly blank look in his eyes as he traces his fingers over the sharp edge, again and again. The door to the temporary barracks cracks open, and Jean jolts, fumbling to hide the shard but not quite managing before Reiner sees it.

A pained expression steals over Reiner’s features as he looks at Jean, hunched defensively over the shard in his palms.

“Marco’s?” he asks softly.

“Fuck off,” Jean spits, which is answer enough. Reiner raises his hands, palms out, as he walks toward Jean, and his expression – his expression screws up _more_ , a deep grief carving lines that age him into his face and Marco. Didn’t know that Reiner cared that much. He played the role of big brother to them all, yeah, but.

Something shivers in Marco’s chest, crawls up his spine to skitter along the inside of his skull.

Reiner reaches out to touch Jean’s shoulder and Jean _flinches_ back, shakes as he grips the shard with white knuckles. “Hey,” Reiner murmurs, like he’s coaxing a wounded animal, “Hey.”

He places his hand on Jean’s shoulder, sits down on bed. “Crying doesn’t make you weak,” he says simply.

“Don’t,” Jean snarls, “Don’t fuckin’ –”

“Grief doesn’t make you weak,” Reiner cuts through, and Jean heaves in a gasp, then another, curling his legs up to his chest and trying so _hard_ to keep himself together. “It’s okay, Jean,” Reiner sighs, and then Jean _crumples_ , his shoulders hunching as he falls in on himself.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he whines, his voice torn and ragged and when he breathes in again it rips through his chest as a sob. “Fuck, I can’t – I _can’t_ , Reiner, I –”

“I know,” Reiner says, his hand going from Jean’s shoulder to the nape of his neck and he pushes Jean forward, till he’s slumped against Reiner’s chest. “I know, it’s okay,” he murmurs, wraps his other arm around Jean’s middle.

Jean presses his face into the crook of Reiner’s neck and _screams_ , the sound tearing through Marco and Marco shudders, crawls onto the bed beside the two of them and ignores how it makes a shiver go down Reiner’s spine.

“Jean,” he whispers, and he would do so much for Jean to be able to hear him. “I’m right here, you kept me with you.”

A broken sound wrenches itself from Jean’s throat, and the door opens again. Reiner blocks Jean with his body easily, craning his neck to see who it is. It’s Bertholdt, the boy’s eyes heavy with something Marco thinks looks almost _guilty_ as he looks at Jean, which doesn’t make any _sense_ –

A pulse from the dark spot in his mind shatters Marco’s thoughts, makes him hunch down on himself and he doesn’t feel _pain_ , anymore, doesn’t feel anything so simple as _pain_. This feels more like whatever particles that make him up are flinging themselves away from one another, feels like _falling apart_ in the most horrifying sense of the phrase.

He can’t stop the shriek from slipping from between his teeth, and both Reiner and Jean start, before Jean curls himself tighter around his grief, hands clutching his head. Bertholdt’s pushing the people trying to get in away, glances at Reiner again and their eyes meet for a heavy moment before the door shuts behind him.

“Fuck,” Jean spits, “fuck fuck fuck fuck _fuck_ , I hate this, I never wanted – we were supposed to go to the military police, we were supposed to _live_ , both of us, or at least him, it’s not – it’s not _fair_ , this isn’t fucking _fair_.”

His voice scrapes dry over these words, and one of his palms sweep the mattress to pick up the shard again as the other fists itself in Reiner’s shirt. “Why the fuck do they do it?” he hisses, anger and grief twisting his face into something sharp, ugly. “Why – they don’t fucking _need_ to fucking eat us, why do they – why –”

Voice breaking, Jean hunches further down in on himself, heaving in bellyfuls of air that don’t seem to reach his lungs, eyes fixed on his knees and ignoring the tears that mark red trails down his face.

Reiner looks stricken, looks lost as he sweeps his hand up and down Jean’s back. “…I don’t know,” he says almost soundlessly. “I’m sorry, I don’t –” his voice breaks, “know.”

…

There are more haunted people than Marco would have thought, before. Not haunted as in traumatized – though there are enough of those, too, especially now – but haunted as in they have a ghost following them around.

Mikasa’s one of them. There’s this half-formed shadow that clings to her right shoulder, drifts after her wherever she goes and it takes some work on Marco’s side, eyes squinting and head tilting and focusing really fucking hard because reality’s a lot more malleable when you’re dead, but eventually, sometimes, he can see the woman behind the shadow. She’s pretty, he thinks, aside from the gaping wounds, long black hair and fine skin and the same eyes as Mikasa, and it’s not too hard to see that she’s Mikasa’s mom – her real one, not the one she shared with Eren.

And Marco is _lonely_ , lonely since everyone on his squad managed to live or move on aside from him, so it takes some bravery – the amorphous blackness Mikasa’s mom is cloaked in is a bit intimidating, as are the gashes along her side – but when Jean and Mikasa are sitting beside each other in silence, as they’ve taken to doing lately, Marco clears his throat and drifts over to where Mikasa’s mom is hovering. Right now she’s more woman than shadow, which helps, he thinks, in the approachability aspect.

“Hi,” he says, repeats himself when Mikasa’s mom shudders and turns slowly to face him. Her feet never touch the ground, and if it weren’t for the axe marks in her body Marco would think she hung herself. “I’m Marco. You’re, um, you’re Mikasa’s mom, right?”

Eyes jagged with that weird disconnection some of the longer-dead ghosts have, Mikasa’s mom frowns, one hand reaching out slowly. Marco steels himself, locks his knees and lets her icy fingertips drift over his face. Blackish blood smears cold over his cheeks.

Marco does not wipe it off.

“Mikasa and I were friends,” he continues, cheerily determined, “When I was alive. She’d help me out with stuff I’d have trouble with, in the manoeuvre gear. Your daughter is very nice.”

Mikasa’s mom’s eyebrows twitch, a breath gurgling through her chest and an expression of sadness steals over the woman’s features, her head slowly tilting to the side as her hand cups Marco’s cheek. Then, in a move Marco wasn’t really expecting, Mikasa’s mom brings her hand to her face, licks her fingers, and begins to attack the mess of Marco’s hair, patting it into smoothness and untangling knots gently. When she’s done, she places her hands on Marco’s shoulders, tilts her head to the other side as she examines him.

“Um,” Marco starts, unsure of what to say. Sort of overwhelmed by being touched for the first time in a while, by the emotions that something so simple as having his hair fixed had brought up.

He’s been lonely, is what he’s saying.

Mikasa’s mom rasps something, the sound rattling in her chest and rising twisted through her wounded neck and Marco can’t understand the words, can’t be sure it was words at all, but Mikasa’s mom tucks him under her arm, drifts till they are between Jean and Mikasa. Another sound curdles up from her throat, and because there doesn’t seem to be much else to do Marco agrees with her.

After a while, Mikasa’s mom’s neck twitches, her back snapping into a sickening arch and then she’s gone, at least for a while, blackness swallowing her up and making her shapeless. The shadow drifts back to Mikasa’s right side.

“…sometimes I can still feel him,” Jean mutters slowly, kicks his foot against the ground.

“You get used to that,” Mikasa says simply, doesn’t say it will get better.

“He would have liked you back. If you’d said something.” Jean looks at his hands, how they’re pressed palm to palm and fingers linked. “Anyone would.”

Now Mikasa smiles gently, turns her head to look at Jean with something soft in her eyes and slides just a bit closer to him, till their sides are touching. “No, he wouldn’t have.”

Jean glances up at her and their eyes meet, Mikasa holding their gaze until something trickles through Jean’s eyes, his expression crumpling. “Fuck,” he curses, turns to look at his feet again. “Fuck, Mikasa. I’m just – I’m not doing so good.”

“I know,” Mikasa replies, and then she puts her hand on Jean’s knee, squeezes it. “You won’t hurt yourself.”

She says these words frankly, keeps her eyes fixed ahead of her as she does and Marco feels like kissing her with gratefulness, because – because sometimes the only thing that kept Jean from cutting was how Marco would start screaming and running around the room and clapping his hands near Jean’s head until Jean got so agitated for no conceivable reason on his part that he’d have to put the blade down and go get air.

“ _Shit_ , Mikasa, fuck _off_ , I don’t need –”

“Jean.” Mikasa has a way of saying people’s names in such a way that it silences them, and this is what she does now. Jean’s jaw ticks, his foot kicking at the ground again. “You are my friend, and you won’t hurt yourself.”

She says this like she is stating a well-known fact, and Jean’s chin begins to wobble. He scrapes his palms over his eyes angrily, biting out several furious curses and when he tries to get up, Mikasa grips his wrist and drags him down till he’s sitting beside her again.

“Don’t leave,” she tells him, and Jean curls over his legs as bitten-back sobs wrench their way from him, sounding painful as they make their way into the air. Mikasa doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything but keep her hand on Jean’s wrist and sit beside him as he cries.

“Eventually, it doesn’t hurt as much,” she says, and Jean flinches from those words like they’re a blow.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this might meander into canon divergence, it's a big mystery

Marco’s pretty sure that he and Mikasa’s mom are friends. More friends then not, anyway, as friendly as they can be considering the fact that Marco’s pretty sure Mikasa’s mom lost whatever sanity you carry with you to the afterlife to that fucking shadow. Whatever it is.

(Marco wonders if he has one, too, before he tucks that thought away for a later date.)

And they’re starting to get a rudimentary communication system down, sort of, so Marco sidles up beside her – a cautionary ache inside him telling him that he is not within arm’s distance of Jean, and that’s fucking worrying, and that’s also something Marco can’t worry about right now.

“I need to find Eren,” he tells her simply. “To make sure he’s okay.” Mikasa shivers. He hasn’t touched her, but she’s sensitive to the presence of the dead in the way others aren’t, which explains some things and obscures others. “Sorry,” he apologizes quickly to her mom. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

Mikasa’s mom tilts her head to the side. “Eren,” she rasps gutturally – on the good days, the very good days, she can manage a few coherent words.

“Yeah,” Marco replies. “Eren. He’s – I don’t know if he’s okay.”

Marco has grown possessive of his living squad mates. They’re _his_ , the last things in this world that are, and they need to be as safe as he can make them, taking into account their general stupidity and recklessness.

And he hasn’t seen Eren at all since he woke up. He knows Eren can’t be dead, not with how well Armin and Mikasa are functioning – he’d seen how they acted when Eren was down for a week with a fever; there’s no way they’d be acting as they are if he were _gone_ – but he hasn’t seen him.

And Marco doesn’t like that, so much.

Mikasa’s mom makes a noise that might have been a hum if her throat wasn’t mangled as it is, and then she sways forward, wraps her arms around Marco. There’s a rush and his ears pop and his stomach drops out at the bottom, and when Marco’s eyes focus again, he is in a jail cell.

It isn’t a surprise to him, that ghosts can go to place to place without…floating there, because he’d seen it happen, had even asked for a lesson till he saw the eyes of the ghost he asked and backed the fuck away because it was an _old_ ghost, old enough to not really be human anymore, but. He’d never experienced it before, would have liked a little warning.

He coughs, feeling strange, as if his body is putting itself back together again slowly. Coughs again, and Mikasa’s mom rubs slow, cold circles on his back before she grasps his chin and directs his gaze to the bed.

Eren is shackled onto it.

There is a vicious surge of _anger_ in him, one so wild it almost scares him, almost doesn’t feel like his own, but he still snarls along with it. Eren wakes with a start, eyes flicking frantically around the darkness of his cell. Mikasa’s mom frowns gently, raises her hand slowly, index finger uncurled. It moves from side to side, movement a little off on account of the ruined knuckles.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

“Sorry,” Marco mutters, taking deep breaths that don’t matter anymore as he tries to calm the fury he feels. Passing a hand over his hair, Mikasa’s mom forgives him by making him presentable again. Then she floats over to Eren’s bedside.

The look she gives Eren abruptly makes Marco miss his mom.

He wonders if she knows he’s dead.

He wonders why he hasn’t thought of her before this.

Eren is still scanning the empty cell with fierce, frightened eyes, and Mikasa’s mom…sort of floats over him, curls herself around him without touching and it’s the first time Marco’s seen her attempt a smile. It’s more of a rictus than anything else, stretching a face that isn’t made for happiness anymore into something like it, and she leans down, down, down, till she is almost kissing the top of Eren’s head. She breathes over him and he is calm as suddenly as he was awake.

Then she’s gone. She doesn’t fade like Franz did; there’s nothing gradual about it, she is just there one moment and isn’t the next, leaving Marco alone with Eren, who is ever-so-slowly falling back asleep.

He is shackled to the bed. Marco is not happy about this.

Actually _touching_ things is hard; it can be done, Marco has seen it been done and has accidentally done it himself once or twice, making a floorboard creak or a door open, but purposefully? He hasn’t been dead long enough to know how to do it purposefully.

Marco makes his way onto Eren’s bed, sitting cross-legged beside him and glaring at the shackles. He’s a quick learner. He’ll figure this out.

Reaching out, Marco _focuses_ , tries to project what’s in his head out, the same as he does when he looks through Mikasa’s mom’s shadow. His fingers slip through the metal and into Eren’s flesh, and Marco _seizes_.

It’s so _warm_ , lifeblood burning him up and he _aches_ for it, that pulse of aliveness thrumming through him, sweet and hot and good. It’d be easy to press himself in further, he thinks wildly, it’d be easy to curl up inside Eren’s skin and warm himself up for a bit.

Marco pushes a little bit, sinks in a little bit, and shudders as his body imitates Eren’s pulse. Then his mind latches onto Eren’s, and Marco’s eyes roll back as he is flooded with Eren’s nightmare, that hungry rage swallowing him up whole and he knows the weight on his shoulders is important but his anger is more so, and he will – he will –

Marco yanks himself back, scrambling off the bed and pressing himself against the far wall.

He was teetering on the edge of something there. Marco isn’t really sure he wants to know what it was.

…

Honestly, he thought the whole teleportation thing would be more complicated than it is, but when he realizes that he needs _out_ of this place, that he can feel something made of greed and warmth and want tugging him back to Eren’s heartbeat, it’s simple.

He still feels that warning hurt, the one telling him he isn’t as close to Jean (to his bone shard) as he could be, and it’s easy to let it grow, fill his chest and his head and his feet. Then Marco shifts his weight to take a step, and he is beside Jean again.

Breathing out deep, Marco slumps down, pressing his forehead to the mattress and letting Jean’s deep half-snores soothe him back into something like calm.

He is electric, he is lightning, he is so much more alive than he was before he sank beneath Eren’s skin, and it scares him as much as it doesn’t, how much he likes this feeling. The body heat that seeps from Jean doesn’t feel as warm, anymore.

“I think I might have made a mistake, Jean,” Marco admits quietly. “I think I fucked up.”

Jean twitches, and the hand under his pillow curls up a little tighter.

…

“—and what the fuck does that even mean, anyway? The whole thing is bullshit. It’s all bullshit. If God gave a shit about us he wouldn’t have made Titans,” Connie spits venomously, and Marco would wrap his arms around the boy if he didn’t know what would happen. The bitterness isn’t surprising, it isn’t, but Connie and Sasha –

He doesn’t know, he just fucking wishes Connie and Sasha didn’t have to have whatever it is that lights them up tarnished like it is.

“I feel you, man,” Jean responds. “I do. They’re all fucking crazy.” He rips his bread into pieces viciously. Sasha takes the cigarette from her lips and passes it to Jean’s. They’d stolen the tobacco and papers this morning.

“Maybe they’re just using it to deny how fucked up this place is,” she says cheerfully. “Make it seem like the Walls aren’t cages. They can’t be cages if they’re holy.”

She only talks like this around Jean and Connie. And Marco now too, he guesses.

“It’s still bullshit,” Connie snarls, because he needs a place to focus his anger and the Wallists are as good of a target as any.

“It is,” Sasha agrees, simple, “But it’s _comforting_ bullshit.”

All three of them fall silent at that.

“I used to want to believe,” Connie says quietly.

“I feel you, man,” Jean responds.

Marco breathes in the sweet smoke, wonders what he’d say if they could hear him.

He doesn’t have much time to wonder, because _blink_ Mikasa’s mom is in front of him with ghoulish fury on her face and her arms held out _blink_ Marco is in a courtroom watching a man kick the shit out of Eren and Marco –

Marco isn’t particularly pleased.

It feels almost like slipping under Eren’s skin had, this surge of rage that fills him up and makes him strong. He could break shackles now if he wanted. He could break necks now if he wanted.

He sidles up close to the man – the Corporal, the King, who gives a fuck – sidles close and curls his fingers around the Corporal’s neck and yanks himself inside on instinct, screams loud inside the Corporal’s head on instinct.

The Corporal stumbles and Marco feels it. The Corporal feels a deep, unsettling violation down to his bones, and Marco thinks that it would be very easy to stay.

And then the Corporal forces him out. Consciously, _purposefully_ , forces him out

Ears ringing, Marco gags even though there is nothing to gag on, displaced and displeased and horrified. Anger gone, replaced by the growing realization that what he did –

Marco is not cruel. He didn’t used to be cruel.

A whimper seeps from his lips before he can stop it, because that wasn’t him, what he did wasn’t what Marco Bodt would do, he is _good_ – 

There is a cold, somewhat mangled hand on his back, rubbing slow circles, and Marco looks up. Mikasa’s mom is smiling that rictus smile at him. 

She looks proud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ayyy what did you think? (this is me asking for comments.
> 
> I really like comments.)


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